This book is not about computer crime, despite the impression you may get from the title. In fact, the whole thrust of the book is to study those people who called themselves hackers before the first computer crime had ever been commited, together with their successors who clung to the name even after it had picked up darker connotations.
The story starts with the original hackers at the AI lab at MIT.
Whilst the Computer Science department at MIT had a typical hierarchical chain of command, something slipped at the nearby AI lab where somehow the lunatics had control of the asylum.
Levy details the glorious early years at the AI lab where hacking was all, elegance won out every time against pragmatism and bedtime was always the wee small hours. Not content with inventing many fundamentals of computer science such as Lisp and time-sharing systems, one hacker even added new machine instructions armed only with a soldering iron. Don't try this at home folks.
Leaving the East Coast, Levy surveys the early West Coast computer scene, including computer hardware hackers such as Steve Wozniak, father of the Apple II, and this leads on to the third wave of hackers, the games writers. It's at this point in the story that big business arives on the scene. Some hackers made the transition successfully, others didn't. I was not surprised to find one of the earliest and most obnoxious "breadheads" of the original home computer scene in this book to be none other than Bill Gates. As far as I can tell from this book, he was always in it for the money. Yeah you're rich Bill, and I'm not, but people just don't like you OR your company, ok?
Having completed a thorough survey of a period of decades in the computer survey, Levy then justifiably stopped and published the book. My edition however is a reissue, and Levy has added an afterword, "The Last Hacker" where he returns to MIT just in time to witness the destruction of the Hackers Citadel by commercial greed.
In this final chapter, Levy is really in his element as he relates the story of the last lone defender on the ramparts, single-handedly holding back the dark barbarian hordes. The defender knew it was a lost cause, but was determined to make his point, and only gave up after exacting fearsome retribution when he had decided to abandon anger and revenge and instead found a new city which would, this time, have unbreachable defences. The name of the lone defender? Richard Stallman. The new city of light? The GNU project - the same project that produced this text editor (Emacs), that facilitated this operating system (Linux) and that is still going strong this very day, thus the book takes us right to the present day - Hackers are alive and well and living near you :-)
Highly Recommended.
Books : The Cuckoo's Egg | Takedown | Hackers
Last updated February 17 1999